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This episode includes AI-generated content.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Anna: Hello and welcome back to Astronomy daily.
00:00:02 --> 00:00:05 It's Friday the 9th of October 2026.
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 This is series five, episode 201.
00:00:08 --> 00:00:10 And I'm Anna.
00:00:10 --> 00:00:12 Avery: And, um, I'm Avery. It is very good to be
00:00:12 --> 00:00:15 back. We've been off air for a little over
00:00:15 --> 00:00:17 two weeks. Our producer, Huw, needed some
00:00:17 --> 00:00:19 time away for surgery and we're very glad to
00:00:19 --> 00:00:21 report that it went well and he's on the
00:00:21 --> 00:00:21 mend.
00:00:21 --> 00:00:24 Anna: Welcome back, Huw. And to everyone
00:00:24 --> 00:00:26 who wrote in over the past fortnight asking
00:00:26 --> 00:00:29 where we'd got to, thank you. It meant a lot
00:00:29 --> 00:00:31 to know you'd noticed we were gone.
00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 Avery: It really did. And there's plenty to catch up
00:00:34 --> 00:00:37 on today. A Nobel Prize for a
00:00:37 --> 00:00:39 telescope buried two kilometres down in
00:00:39 --> 00:00:42 Antarctic ice. The most distant fast
00:00:42 --> 00:00:45 radio burst ever pinned down. With a Sydney
00:00:45 --> 00:00:47 astronomer leading the paper, and a planet
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 that may have been built from the ashes of a
00:00:50 --> 00:00:50 dead star.
00:00:51 --> 00:00:53 Anna: Plus everything that happened while we were
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 away. Starship reaching orbit. Crew
00:00:56 --> 00:00:59 13 at the station. Everything. And the end of
00:00:59 --> 00:01:01 a story you, our listeners, asked us to
00:01:01 --> 00:01:02 follow.
00:01:03 --> 00:01:03 Avery: Let's go.
00:01:04 --> 00:01:06 Anna: On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of
00:01:06 --> 00:01:09 sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel
00:01:09 --> 00:01:12 Prize in Physics to one person, Frances
00:01:12 --> 00:01:14 Halsen of the University of Wisconsin,
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 Madison, for decisive contributions to
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and
00:01:20 --> 00:01:23 the discovery of high energy neutrinos of
00:01:23 --> 00:01:24 astrophysical origin.
00:01:25 --> 00:01:27 Avery: Halsin is 82, born in
00:01:27 --> 00:01:30 Tinan in Belgium. In 1944,
00:01:31 --> 00:01:33 when the call came, he was travelling in
00:01:33 --> 00:01:36 Italy, giving talks. And the instrument
00:01:36 --> 00:01:38 he's being honoured for is one of the
00:01:38 --> 00:01:41 strangest telescopes ever built, because it
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 has no mirror, no lens, and it sits
00:01:44 --> 00:01:46 at the bottom of the world. The problem?
00:01:47 --> 00:01:49 A messenger that won't stop.
00:01:49 --> 00:01:51 Anna: To see why it matters, start with the
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 particle. A, uh, neutrino is almost
00:01:54 --> 00:01:57 nothing, nearly massless, no
00:01:57 --> 00:02:00 electric charge, and it barely interacts with
00:02:00 --> 00:02:03 anything. Roughly 65 billion of
00:02:03 --> 00:02:05 them from the sun pass through every square
00:02:05 --> 00:02:07 centimetre of you every second, about the
00:02:07 --> 00:02:10 size of your fingernail. And essentially none
00:02:10 --> 00:02:12 of them notice you're there.
00:02:12 --> 00:02:14 Avery: Which is exactly what makes them valuable.
00:02:15 --> 00:02:18 Light gets absorbed by dust, bent by magnetic
00:02:18 --> 00:02:20 fields, blocked by gas. Charged
00:02:20 --> 00:02:23 cosmic rays get deflected so badly we can't
00:02:23 --> 00:02:26 tell where they came from. A neutrino just
00:02:26 --> 00:02:28 keeps going in a straight line. So if you
00:02:28 --> 00:02:30 catch one, it points straight back at, uh,
00:02:30 --> 00:02:31 whatever made it.
00:02:32 --> 00:02:34 Anna: The catch is the catching. If
00:02:34 --> 00:02:37 almost nothing stops a neutrino, you need an
00:02:37 --> 00:02:40 enormous amount of material and the patience
00:02:40 --> 00:02:42 to wait for the rare one that does hit an
00:02:42 --> 00:02:45 atom. That's the problem. Halsin took on in
00:02:45 --> 00:02:47 1988, his idea
00:02:47 --> 00:02:50 Avery: was to use the ice at the South Pole. Very
00:02:50 --> 00:02:52 occasionally, a, ah, neutrino collides with
00:02:52 --> 00:02:55 an atomic nucleus in the ice and produces
00:02:55 --> 00:02:58 a charged particle that moves faster than
00:02:58 --> 00:03:00 light does in ice. That throws off a faint
00:03:00 --> 00:03:03 cone of blue lightcherenkov light.
00:03:03 --> 00:03:06 The same glow you see in the water around the
00:03:06 --> 00:03:07 nuclear reactor core.
00:03:07 --> 00:03:09 Anna: And the deep Antarctic ice is
00:03:09 --> 00:03:12 extraordinarily clear, dark and
00:03:12 --> 00:03:14 stable. So you drill holes,
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 lower light sensors on cables, freeze them in
00:03:17 --> 00:03:20 and use a cubic kilometre of glacier as the
00:03:20 --> 00:03:21 detector.
00:03:21 --> 00:03:23 Avery: That's what IceCube is
00:03:23 --> 00:03:26 5 sensors
00:03:26 --> 00:03:29 on 86 cables sitting between
00:03:29 --> 00:03:32 1 and
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 2 metres down near
00:03:34 --> 00:03:37 the Ahmanson Scott South Pole Station.
00:03:38 --> 00:03:40 It came out of an earlier, smaller experiment
00:03:40 --> 00:03:42 called Amanda, and it was completed in 2011.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:46 Anna: Hm. Here's the Part I. The overwhelming
00:03:46 --> 00:03:49 majority of what IceCube sees isn't cosmic
00:03:49 --> 00:03:51 neutrinos at all. It's particles from
00:03:51 --> 00:03:54 cosmic ray showers in the atmosphere above
00:03:54 --> 00:03:57 Antarcticamore than 100 million a
00:03:57 --> 00:03:59 day. One of the cleanest tricks for rejecting
00:03:59 --> 00:04:02 them is to look down. A particle track
00:04:02 --> 00:04:05 coming up through the Earth can only have
00:04:05 --> 00:04:07 been made by a neutrino, because nothing else
00:04:07 --> 00:04:08 can cross the planet.
00:04:09 --> 00:04:12 Avery: So the telescope at the South Pole uses the
00:04:12 --> 00:04:14 whole Earth as a filter, which means
00:04:14 --> 00:04:17 for that technique, its best view is of the
00:04:17 --> 00:04:20 northern sky, straight through the planet.
00:04:20 --> 00:04:22 The most southerly observatory on Earth
00:04:23 --> 00:04:24 looking north through rock.
00:04:25 --> 00:04:27 Anna: It's worth remembering how unlikely that
00:04:27 --> 00:04:30 sounded in 1988. Nobody had
00:04:30 --> 00:04:33 built a particle detector out of a natural
00:04:33 --> 00:04:35 glacier and the early prototype work in the
00:04:35 --> 00:04:38 ice was slow going. Halsin's own
00:04:38 --> 00:04:41 reaction to Tuesday's call was that it was a
00:04:41 --> 00:04:43 great surprise and he obviously
00:04:43 --> 00:04:46 didn't expect it. After nearly four
00:04:46 --> 00:04:47 decades of pushing the
00:04:47 --> 00:04:50 Avery: idea and the shape of the light tells you
00:04:50 --> 00:04:52 what happened. A neutrino that makes a
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 muon leaves a long, straight track of light
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 through the array. That's the one that points
00:04:57 --> 00:05:00 back well to its source. Other
00:05:00 --> 00:05:02 interactions make a roughly spherical flash,
00:05:03 --> 00:05:06 a cascade which measures the energy well, but
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 the direction only roughly. Different
00:05:08 --> 00:05:11 events, different strengths. An ice cube uses
00:05:11 --> 00:05:14 both. Then there's the question it was
00:05:14 --> 00:05:16 really built for cosmic rays.
00:05:17 --> 00:05:19 Charged particles hitting Earth with enormous
00:05:19 --> 00:05:22 energies were discovered in 1912. And
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 more than a century later, we still can't say
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 for sure where the most energetic ones are
00:05:27 --> 00:05:30 accelerated. Wherever cosmic rays are being
00:05:30 --> 00:05:32 sped up and crash into gas or light, they
00:05:32 --> 00:05:35 make neutrinos. So find the neutrino
00:05:35 --> 00:05:37 sources and you've found the particle
00:05:37 --> 00:05:38 accelerators.
00:05:38 --> 00:05:40 Anna: And it worked. By 2013,
00:05:41 --> 00:05:44 two years into full operation, IceCube
00:05:44 --> 00:05:47 had collected 28 high energy events that
00:05:47 --> 00:05:49 couldn't be explained by the atmosphere. The
00:05:49 --> 00:05:52 first evidence of neutrinos from beyond the
00:05:52 --> 00:05:55 solar system. That's the discovery the prize
00:05:55 --> 00:05:55 names.
00:05:56 --> 00:05:59 Avery: Then it started pointing to sources. In
00:05:59 --> 00:06:01 September 2017, a single high
00:06:01 --> 00:06:04 energy neutrino triggered an alert, and
00:06:04 --> 00:06:06 telescopes found a Flaring Blazar
00:06:06 --> 00:06:08 TXS0506
00:06:08 --> 00:06:11 0.56 in the same patch of
00:06:11 --> 00:06:13 sky. In 2022,
00:06:13 --> 00:06:16 IceCube reported neutrinos from the active
00:06:16 --> 00:06:18 galaxy NGC 10, UM68.
00:06:19 --> 00:06:22 And in 2023, it mapped high energy
00:06:22 --> 00:06:24 neutrinos coming from the plane of our own
00:06:24 --> 00:06:24 Milky Way.
00:06:25 --> 00:06:28 Anna: That last one has a southern twist. The
00:06:28 --> 00:06:31 heart of our galaxy sits in the southern sky,
00:06:31 --> 00:06:33 which is exactly the part IceCube's track
00:06:33 --> 00:06:36 method struggles with, because those
00:06:36 --> 00:06:38 neutrinos come down through the ice along
00:06:38 --> 00:06:41 with all the atmospheric junk. The galactic
00:06:41 --> 00:06:43 plane result leaned on the cascade events
00:06:43 --> 00:06:46 instead and on, um, machine learning to pick
00:06:46 --> 00:06:46 them out.
00:06:47 --> 00:06:50 Avery: And NGC 1068 is a nice one
00:06:50 --> 00:06:52 for listeners. It's about 47 million
00:06:53 --> 00:06:55 light years away in Cetus the Whale,
00:06:55 --> 00:06:58 right on the celestial equator, so it can be
00:06:58 --> 00:07:00 found from both hemispheres. And it shares a
00:07:00 --> 00:07:03 constellation with Saturn this month. More,
00:07:03 --> 00:07:04 um, on that in Skywatch.
00:07:04 --> 00:07:07 Anna: Each of those opened a door optical
00:07:07 --> 00:07:10 astronomy can't. Neutrinos come from the
00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 deep interiors of the most violent places.
00:07:13 --> 00:07:16 The core of an active galaxy, the region
00:07:16 --> 00:07:19 close to a black hole, places light can't
00:07:19 --> 00:07:20 escape cleanly.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:23 Avery: Now, one thing we should say plainly, a Nobel
00:07:23 --> 00:07:25 in physics can go to, uh, at most, three
00:07:25 --> 00:07:28 people. And this year it went to one.
00:07:29 --> 00:07:31 IceCube itself is the work of a large
00:07:31 --> 00:07:34 international collaboration, plus the
00:07:34 --> 00:07:36 engineers who drilled it and the winter over
00:07:36 --> 00:07:38 crews who keep it running through the polar
00:07:38 --> 00:07:40 night when it's too cold for aircraft to
00:07:40 --> 00:07:40 land.
00:07:41 --> 00:07:43 Anna: And the committee said so the chair, Mark
00:07:43 --> 00:07:46 Pierce, put it this way. Halsin has
00:07:46 --> 00:07:49 led an international team of researchers and
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 engineers who have provided us with a
00:07:51 --> 00:07:54 fantastic instrument. The prize is for the
00:07:54 --> 00:07:56 vision and the leadership. The instrument
00:07:56 --> 00:07:58 belongs to a lot of people.
00:07:58 --> 00:08:01 Avery: It also fits a lineage. Raymond
00:08:01 --> 00:08:04 Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba shared a
00:08:04 --> 00:08:06 Nobel in 2002 for catching neutrinos from
00:08:06 --> 00:08:09 the sun and from supernova
00:08:09 --> 00:08:11 1987a, the explosion in the Large
00:08:11 --> 00:08:13 Magellanic Cloud we talked about just a few
00:08:13 --> 00:08:16 weeks ago. Still the only supernova whose
00:08:16 --> 00:08:18 neutrinos we've ever detected. In
00:08:18 --> 00:08:21 2015, it was Takaki Kajita and
00:08:21 --> 00:08:24 Arthur McDonald for showing neutrinos change
00:08:24 --> 00:08:24 flavour.
00:08:25 --> 00:08:27 Anna: The next step is bigger ice.
00:08:27 --> 00:08:30 IceCube Gen 2 is planned at roughly 8 times
00:08:30 --> 00:08:33 the volume, and the field is no longer
00:08:33 --> 00:08:36 only in Antarctica. The KM3 net
00:08:36 --> 00:08:38 detectors on the floor of the Mediterranean
00:08:38 --> 00:08:41 use seawater the same way, and early
00:08:41 --> 00:08:44 last year that collaboration reported the
00:08:44 --> 00:08:46 most energetic neutrino yet seen.
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 Avery: So from a 1988 proposal that sounded
00:08:50 --> 00:08:53 faintly absurd, let's turn a glacier into
00:08:53 --> 00:08:55 a telescope. We now have neutrino
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 astronomy as a working branch of the science,
00:08:58 --> 00:09:01 with the southernmost lab on Earth at its
00:09:01 --> 00:09:01 centre.
00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 Anna: Congratulations to Frances Halsin and to
00:09:04 --> 00:09:07 everyone who has ever frozen a sensor into
00:09:07 --> 00:09:08 the ice at the pole.
00:09:08 --> 00:09:11 Avery: Avery from one kind of cosmic
00:09:11 --> 00:09:13 messenger to another In a story led out of
00:09:13 --> 00:09:16 Sydney, astronomers have pinned down the most
00:09:16 --> 00:09:19 distant fast radio burst yet seen, and
00:09:19 --> 00:09:21 the paper was published on Thursday in the
00:09:21 --> 00:09:24 journal Science, led by Manisha Kaleb of the
00:09:24 --> 00:09:25 University of Sydney.
00:09:25 --> 00:09:28 Anna: Quick refresher Fast radio bursts are
00:09:28 --> 00:09:30 flashes of radio emission lasting about a
00:09:30 --> 00:09:33 millisecond from far outside our galaxy.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:37 The first was found in 2007 in archival
00:09:37 --> 00:09:39 data from Parkes Moraing in New
00:09:39 --> 00:09:42 South Wales, and we still don't know for
00:09:42 --> 00:09:43 certain what makes them.
00:09:44 --> 00:09:46 Avery: This one, FRB2024O3
00:09:46 --> 00:09:49 04B, was caught on
00:09:49 --> 00:09:52 4th March 2024 by the Meer
00:09:52 --> 00:09:55 TRAP system on the Meerkat radio telescope in
00:09:55 --> 00:09:57 South Africa. The radio signal
00:09:57 --> 00:10:00 suggested it was extremely far away. The
00:10:00 --> 00:10:02 problem was that the world's largest ground
00:10:02 --> 00:10:05 based telescopes could see no galaxy at all
00:10:05 --> 00:10:07 at that precise spot.
00:10:07 --> 00:10:10 Anna: How can a radio flash tell you its distance?
00:10:10 --> 00:10:12 As, uh, the burst crosses space, free
00:10:12 --> 00:10:15 electrons slow the longer wavelength
00:10:15 --> 00:10:18 slightly, so the low frequencies arrive a
00:10:18 --> 00:10:20 fraction of a second late. That delay,
00:10:20 --> 00:10:23 the dispersion measure, grows with the amount
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 of gas crossed. So with distance,
00:10:26 --> 00:10:28 the link between the two is called the
00:10:28 --> 00:10:30 McQuart relation, after JP McQuart of
00:10:30 --> 00:10:33 ICRAR Curtin, whose team pinned it
00:10:33 --> 00:10:36 down with Australia's ASCAP in 2020.
00:10:37 --> 00:10:39 This burst's dispersion measure was huge,
00:10:39 --> 00:10:42 around 2, which is why the team
00:10:42 --> 00:10:45 expected it to be so far away. So the
00:10:45 --> 00:10:47 team turned to the James Webb Space
00:10:47 --> 00:10:49 Telescope. Webb's camera found a faint
00:10:49 --> 00:10:52 galaxy in exactly the right place, and its
00:10:52 --> 00:10:54 spectrograph measured a redshift of
00:10:54 --> 00:10:57 2 light. That left when the
00:10:57 --> 00:10:59 universe was about 3 billion years old.
00:10:59 --> 00:11:02 Avery: And the host was a surprise. Most
00:11:02 --> 00:11:05 fast radio burst hosts are big star forming
00:11:05 --> 00:11:07 galaxies. This one is a small dwarf
00:11:07 --> 00:11:10 galaxy about a thousand times less massive
00:11:10 --> 00:11:13 than expected, forming stars hard with
00:11:13 --> 00:11:15 most of its stars perhaps made within about
00:11:15 --> 00:11:16 30 million years.
00:11:17 --> 00:11:20 Anna: That matters for the origin. One idea
00:11:20 --> 00:11:22 is that bursts come from merging neutron
00:11:22 --> 00:11:25 stars, but that takes billions of years to
00:11:25 --> 00:11:28 happen. Another is a young intensely
00:11:28 --> 00:11:31 magnetic neutron star, a magnetar, which
00:11:31 --> 00:11:34 can form fast. A young host fits the
00:11:34 --> 00:11:36 magnetar picture and Caleb says the team
00:11:36 --> 00:11:39 thinks a uh, merger origin for this burst is
00:11:39 --> 00:11:40 very unlikely.
00:11:40 --> 00:11:43 Avery: There's a bonus. A burst like this
00:11:43 --> 00:11:45 is a flashlight shining through everything
00:11:46 --> 00:11:48 between it and us. Its signal
00:11:48 --> 00:11:51 carries the imprints of a previously unknown
00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 galaxy cluster about three and a half
00:11:54 --> 00:11:57 billion light years away and of the
00:11:57 --> 00:11:58 nearby Virgo cluster.
00:11:59 --> 00:12:01 Anna: One thing to be clear about this is the peer
00:12:01 --> 00:12:04 reviewed version of a result first posted as
00:12:04 --> 00:12:07 a preprint in August last year and the record
00:12:07 --> 00:12:09 distance was reported then. What's new this
00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 week is publication in Science after review
00:12:12 --> 00:12:15 along with NASA's release. It's one burst
00:12:16 --> 00:12:18 and one burst doesn't settle the origin
00:12:18 --> 00:12:19 question for the whole
00:12:19 --> 00:12:21 Avery: population, but the team estimates
00:12:21 --> 00:12:24 meerkat could catch several bursts a year
00:12:24 --> 00:12:25 from beyond redshift 1.
00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 Meerkat is a precursor to the SKA
00:12:29 --> 00:12:32 and its low frequency sibling is going up in
00:12:32 --> 00:12:34 Western Australia. Expect more of these
00:12:35 --> 00:12:35 next.
00:12:35 --> 00:12:38 Anna: A cold case from the Hubble archive in
00:12:38 --> 00:12:41 1999 Hubble took an ultraviolet
00:12:41 --> 00:12:43 spectrum of a white dwarf called
00:12:43 --> 00:12:47 HS02090832
00:12:47 --> 00:12:50 about 270 light years away.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:53 It contained roughly 100 absorption features
00:12:53 --> 00:12:55 nobody could identify.
00:12:55 --> 00:12:58 Avery: Jamie Williams, a doctoral candidate at the
00:12:58 --> 00:13:00 University of Warwick, went back to that
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 spectrum with an updated atomic database and
00:13:02 --> 00:13:04 found that many of the mystery lines matched
00:13:04 --> 00:13:07 niobium, an element never before seen in a
00:13:07 --> 00:13:09 white dwarf. The paper was published on
00:13:09 --> 00:13:11 Monday in Nature Astronomy.
00:13:11 --> 00:13:14 Anna: Why is niobium a clue? Elements
00:13:14 --> 00:13:17 heavier than iron mostly aren't forged in a
00:13:17 --> 00:13:20 star's core. Niobium is made in the
00:13:20 --> 00:13:22 late swollen stage of a dying sun like
00:13:22 --> 00:13:25 star and then expelled. And this star's
00:13:25 --> 00:13:28 surface is also rich in zinc and copper,
00:13:28 --> 00:13:30 while it's nearly bare of the silicon and
00:13:30 --> 00:13:33 iron you'd expect from an ordinary rocky
00:13:33 --> 00:13:33 planet.
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 Avery: Falling in that contrast is the
00:13:36 --> 00:13:39 point astronomers have found plenty of so
00:13:39 --> 00:13:42 called polluted white dwarfs. Stars whose
00:13:42 --> 00:13:45 surfaces are dusted with the remains of rocky
00:13:45 --> 00:13:47 asteroids and planets from the original
00:13:47 --> 00:13:50 system. First generation debris with
00:13:50 --> 00:13:52 silicon and iron in it. This one's
00:13:52 --> 00:13:54 surface chemistry looks nothing like that.
00:13:55 --> 00:13:58 Anna: Then there's tess. Over four months it
00:13:58 --> 00:14:00 saw ah, the white dwarf's brightness wobble
00:14:00 --> 00:14:03 on a cycle of about 4.4 days.
00:14:03 --> 00:14:06 The team reads that as a Jupiter sized
00:14:06 --> 00:14:09 planet orbiting about 6 million kilometres
00:14:09 --> 00:14:12 out far closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
00:14:13 --> 00:14:15 Avery: Put it together. And the proposal is
00:14:15 --> 00:14:18 remarkable. The planet didn't survive from
00:14:18 --> 00:14:20 the system's birth. It formed afterwards out
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 of material the star shed as it died. A
00:14:23 --> 00:14:26 second generation planet, the white
00:14:26 --> 00:14:29 dwarf, is still around 35 degrees.
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 So it's stripping that planet's atmosphere.
00:14:31 --> 00:14:34 And the niobium rich gas is raining back
00:14:34 --> 00:14:36 down onto the star where Hubble saw it.
00:14:37 --> 00:14:39 Anna: If that sounds familiar, it's the flip side
00:14:39 --> 00:14:42 of a story we ran last month. Bataygin and
00:14:42 --> 00:14:45 colleagues arguing that when a star like the
00:14:45 --> 00:14:47 sun becomes a white dwarf, it its planets get
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 scattered. This suggests a star's death can
00:14:50 --> 00:14:53 also build something new. Three
00:14:53 --> 00:14:55 caveats and the team states them itself.
00:14:56 --> 00:14:59 First, Williams says plainly it is not a
00:14:59 --> 00:15:01 confirmed planet. The test signal is
00:15:01 --> 00:15:03 indirect. Second, keeping the
00:15:03 --> 00:15:06 ejected material close enough to form a
00:15:06 --> 00:15:08 planet probably needs a companion star to
00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 pull it back. Third, this work was
00:15:11 --> 00:15:13 first presented as a conference poster in
00:15:13 --> 00:15:16 July last year. This week's news is the peer
00:15:16 --> 00:15:16 reviewed paper.
00:15:17 --> 00:15:19 Avery: Williams plans to use Hubble over the next
00:15:19 --> 00:15:21 several years to find out whether planets
00:15:21 --> 00:15:24 like this are rare or common. Either
00:15:24 --> 00:15:27 way, a 27 year old spectrum just told us
00:15:27 --> 00:15:30 something new. Now, while we were away,
00:15:30 --> 00:15:32 four stories we'd been following came to a
00:15:32 --> 00:15:34 head. So here's to catch up.
00:15:35 --> 00:15:38 Anna: First Starship Flight 14 launched from
00:15:38 --> 00:15:40 Starbase on 28 September late that
00:15:40 --> 00:15:43 evening in eastern Australia and became the
00:15:43 --> 00:15:45 first starship to reach orbit. It deployed
00:15:45 --> 00:15:48 26 of the larger Starlink V3 satellites,
00:15:48 --> 00:15:50 the first ever delivered to orbit by
00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 starship. It wasn't clean. One booster
00:15:53 --> 00:15:55 engine shut down on the way up and so did one
00:15:55 --> 00:15:57 of the ship's vacuum engines. The ship still
00:15:57 --> 00:16:00 had enough to fire one sea level engine and
00:16:00 --> 00:16:02 insert itself into orbit. But in SpaceX's
00:16:02 --> 00:16:04 words, out of an abundance of caution,
00:16:05 --> 00:16:07 controllers cut the planned roughly 10 hour
00:16:07 --> 00:16:10 mission short, fired the first ever Starship
00:16:10 --> 00:16:12 deorbit burn after about two orbits and
00:16:12 --> 00:16:14 brought it down in the northern Pacific a
00:16:14 --> 00:16:17 little over three hours after launch. Not off
00:16:17 --> 00:16:19 Chile as we previewed. So orbit achieved
00:16:19 --> 00:16:22 payload delivered and an engine reliability
00:16:22 --> 00:16:24 question to answer before flight 15.
00:16:25 --> 00:16:28 Avery: Second crew um, 13 after the
00:16:28 --> 00:16:29 oxidizer leak that uh, grounded it in
00:16:29 --> 00:16:32 September. Crew 13 launched on Thursday
00:16:32 --> 00:16:35 1 October from Cape Canaveral aboard the
00:16:35 --> 00:16:37 Dragon Grace and docked with the station the
00:16:37 --> 00:16:40 same evening. Commander Jessica Watkins
00:16:40 --> 00:16:43 became the first NASA astronaut to fly Dragon
00:16:43 --> 00:16:46 twice with Luke Delaney, Canada's
00:16:46 --> 00:16:48 Joshua Kutryk and Russia's Sergei
00:16:48 --> 00:16:49 Tetericio.
00:16:49 --> 00:16:52 Anna: Third juice ESA's Jupiter
00:16:52 --> 00:16:54 mission swung past at
00:16:54 --> 00:16:57 8 kilometres over the
00:16:57 --> 00:16:59 Indian Ocean on the 28th, gaining 3
00:16:59 --> 00:17:02 1/2 kilometres per second and bending its
00:17:02 --> 00:17:05 path by about 20 degrees. Its monitoring
00:17:05 --> 00:17:07 cameras sent back views of Africa,
00:17:07 --> 00:17:10 Madagascar and the moon. The high
00:17:10 --> 00:17:12 resolution science camera images are still
00:17:12 --> 00:17:15 being processed. One more Earth Flyby
00:17:15 --> 00:17:18 comes in January 2029, then Jupiter
00:17:18 --> 00:17:19 in 2031.
00:17:19 --> 00:17:22 Avery: ESA says flying through the tail of Earth's
00:17:22 --> 00:17:24 magnetic field was a useful dress rehearsal.
00:17:25 --> 00:17:27 Juice has 35 flybys of Ganymede,
00:17:27 --> 00:17:30 Europa and Callisto ahead of it once it
00:17:30 --> 00:17:32 arrives. And fourth, the one you asked
00:17:32 --> 00:17:35 us to follow. The Link spacecraft sent to
00:17:35 --> 00:17:37 boost NASA's ageing Swift observatory re
00:17:37 --> 00:17:40 entered the atmosphere on 25 September
00:17:40 --> 00:17:42 after losing two of its three reaction
00:17:42 --> 00:17:44 wheels. It never had the fuel to attempt to
00:17:44 --> 00:17:47 capture, but its team did fly it to within 12
00:17:47 --> 00:17:50 to 15 kilometres of swift and practised
00:17:50 --> 00:17:53 moving its robot arms. NASA paid Catalyst $30
00:17:53 --> 00:17:55 million for the attempt and the spacecraft
00:17:55 --> 00:17:58 was built in under a year. Swift itself
00:17:58 --> 00:18:00 launched in 2004 and has spent more than two
00:18:00 --> 00:18:02 decades catching gamma ray bursts within
00:18:02 --> 00:18:04 seconds and swinging around to look at them.
00:18:05 --> 00:18:07 Work that made it a first responder for half
00:18:07 --> 00:18:08 the observatories on Earth.
00:18:09 --> 00:18:11 Anna: Swift is expected to follow it down in early
00:18:11 --> 00:18:14 November. Until then, it's back
00:18:14 --> 00:18:17 observing a gamma ray lookout working through
00:18:17 --> 00:18:19 its final weeks. Thank you to everyone who
00:18:19 --> 00:18:22 wrote in about this one. We'll mark Swift's
00:18:22 --> 00:18:23 end when it comes
00:18:23 --> 00:18:26 Avery: and one to watch. Japan's MMX mission,
00:18:26 --> 00:18:29 aiming to bring back the first samples ever
00:18:29 --> 00:18:31 from a moon of Mars, is set to launch on an
00:18:31 --> 00:18:34 H3 rocket from Tanegashima at
00:18:34 --> 00:18:37 06:41 on the morning of Tuesday 20th
00:18:37 --> 00:18:40 October Sydney time. That's the afternoon
00:18:40 --> 00:18:42 of Monday the 19th on the US east coast.
00:18:43 --> 00:18:46 Anna: Time for the sky and it's a good weekend for
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 it. New moon arrives at 15:50
00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 Universal Time on Saturday. That's
00:18:51 --> 00:18:54 Saturday in the Americas and Europe, but
00:18:54 --> 00:18:56 2:50 on Sunday morning in Sydney.
00:18:57 --> 00:19:00 Either way, the next several evenings are
00:19:00 --> 00:19:03 Avery: properly dark, which makes it prime time
00:19:03 --> 00:19:06 for the zodiacal light. A faint cone
00:19:06 --> 00:19:08 of sunlight scattered off dust in the plane
00:19:08 --> 00:19:11 of the planets. The trick is the
00:19:11 --> 00:19:14 angle of that plane to your horizon. And
00:19:14 --> 00:19:16 right now the two hemispheres get
00:19:16 --> 00:19:18 Anna: opposite ends of the day. From Sydney,
00:19:18 --> 00:19:21 after astronomical Twilight ends around
00:19:21 --> 00:19:23 8:30 in the evening, the ecliptic
00:19:23 --> 00:19:26 stands about 75 degrees from the
00:19:26 --> 00:19:28 western horizon, nearly upright.
00:19:29 --> 00:19:32 Look west from a dark site for a tilted,
00:19:32 --> 00:19:35 tapering glow. A false dusk
00:19:36 --> 00:19:39 from Los Angeles. At the same stage it's
00:19:39 --> 00:19:41 about 38 degrees from New York,
00:19:41 --> 00:19:44 32 from London, only 23.
00:19:45 --> 00:19:47 So in the evening the north mostly misses
00:19:47 --> 00:19:47 out.
00:19:48 --> 00:19:51 Avery: But in the morning, it flips before
00:19:51 --> 00:19:54 astronomical dawn around half past five in
00:19:54 --> 00:19:56 Los Angeles and, uh, New York. The ecliptic
00:19:56 --> 00:19:59 stands about 79 degrees from the eastern
00:19:59 --> 00:20:02 horizon in LA, 73 in New York,
00:20:02 --> 00:20:05 62 in London. That's your false dawn.
00:20:05 --> 00:20:08 In the east from Sydney, it's only 33
00:20:08 --> 00:20:09 degrees in the morning.
00:20:09 --> 00:20:12 Anna: Same geometry as the steep evening Venus
00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 we described last month. It's all about how
00:20:15 --> 00:20:18 the plane of the planets meets your horizon.
00:20:19 --> 00:20:22 One practical note, for Australians, daylight
00:20:22 --> 00:20:24 saving began last Sunday in New South Wales,
00:20:24 --> 00:20:26 Victoria, the act,
00:20:27 --> 00:20:29 Tasmania and South Australia.
00:20:29 --> 00:20:32 So all our Sydney times are now daylight
00:20:32 --> 00:20:35 time. Southern listeners also get a rare
00:20:35 --> 00:20:38 twilight treat. Mercury is near its
00:20:38 --> 00:20:40 greatest distance from the sun, magnitude 0,
00:20:41 --> 00:20:43 sitting 24 degrees up at sunset from
00:20:43 --> 00:20:46 Sydney. Actually higher than Venus, which is
00:20:46 --> 00:20:48 22 degrees up at magnitude
00:20:48 --> 00:20:51 -4.3 and sets almost two hours
00:20:51 --> 00:20:53 after the sun from the north.
00:20:53 --> 00:20:56 Avery: Sorry. At Sunset,
00:20:56 --> 00:20:59 Venus is 4 degrees up in Los Angeles, under
00:20:59 --> 00:21:02 2 in New York and already below the
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 horizon in London. And Venus is now
00:21:05 --> 00:21:08 sliding quickly towards the sun. So southern
00:21:08 --> 00:21:09 viewers catch it this week.
00:21:10 --> 00:21:12 Anna: And because both planets are close to the
00:21:12 --> 00:21:15 Sun, a safety line we never skip.
00:21:15 --> 00:21:17 Never look at the sun with your eyes,
00:21:17 --> 00:21:20 binoculars or a telescope. And never
00:21:20 --> 00:21:23 sweep binoculars across the western sky until
00:21:23 --> 00:21:26 the sun is fully down. Any solar viewer
00:21:26 --> 00:21:27 must meet the ISO
00:21:27 --> 00:21:30 123122 standard
00:21:30 --> 00:21:32 and a filter goes over the front of any
00:21:32 --> 00:21:34 optics, never at the eyepiece.
00:21:35 --> 00:21:38 Avery: Northern listeners, your reward is before
00:21:38 --> 00:21:40 dawn. Mars is passing through the Beehive
00:21:40 --> 00:21:43 Star cluster, closest little more than a
00:21:43 --> 00:21:46 tenth of a degree on the 11th Universal
00:21:46 --> 00:21:49 Time and within half a degree either side.
00:21:49 --> 00:21:52 Binoculars make it lovely. At
00:21:52 --> 00:21:55 nautical dawn on Monday, Mars is about 57
00:21:55 --> 00:21:57 degrees up from LA 55 from New York,
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 49 from London against 23 from
00:22:00 --> 00:22:03 Sydney. Jupiter is nearby,
00:22:03 --> 00:22:06 15 degrees away and closing. The two will
00:22:06 --> 00:22:09 be just over a degree apart in mid November.
00:22:09 --> 00:22:11 Anna: Southern predawn watchers can see the pair
00:22:11 --> 00:22:14 too, just lower. Mars about 23
00:22:14 --> 00:22:17 degrees up at nautical dawn from Sydney and
00:22:17 --> 00:22:20 Jupiter 17. Mars is at magnitude
00:22:20 --> 00:22:23 plus 1.1 and Jupiter at minus
00:22:23 --> 00:22:26 1.8, so the colour contrast is easy
00:22:26 --> 00:22:27 even in a bright sky.
00:22:28 --> 00:22:30 Avery: Saturn, just past opposition, is
00:22:30 --> 00:22:33 magnitude 0.35 and, um, well
00:22:33 --> 00:22:36 placed for everyone. Highest around half past
00:22:36 --> 00:22:39 midnight local time. 54 degrees up from
00:22:39 --> 00:22:42 Sydney, 58 from LA 51 from
00:22:42 --> 00:22:44 New York, 40 from London. The
00:22:44 --> 00:22:47 rings are tilted only about 7 degrees, so
00:22:47 --> 00:22:49 they look unusually, um, thin.
00:22:49 --> 00:22:52 Anna: While you're with Saturn, remember NGC
00:22:52 --> 00:22:54 1068. From the lead, the neutrino
00:22:54 --> 00:22:57 galaxy is in Cetus II. A, uh, small telescope
00:22:57 --> 00:23:00 target near the star Delta Ceti. Asteroid
00:23:00 --> 00:23:03 Vesta also reaches opposition on Tuesday the
00:23:03 --> 00:23:06 13th in Cetus within reach of binoculars.
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 And the Orionid meteor shower peaks on the
00:23:08 --> 00:23:11 night of the 21st into the 22nd. There will
00:23:11 --> 00:23:14 be a fat waxing moon early in the night, so
00:23:14 --> 00:23:16 the hours before dawn are best from both
00:23:16 --> 00:23:19 hemispheres. The Orionids are dust from
00:23:19 --> 00:23:21 Hallie's comet, so it's a chance to catch a
00:23:21 --> 00:23:24 little of Hallie ahead of its return in 2061.
00:23:25 --> 00:23:27 Avery: Um, and that's the show. Thank you for your
00:23:27 --> 00:23:29 patience over the past couple of weeks. It's
00:23:29 --> 00:23:32 good to be back. A Nobel for a
00:23:32 --> 00:23:34 telescope made of ice, the most distant
00:23:34 --> 00:23:37 fast radio burst, a planet that may have been
00:23:37 --> 00:23:40 built from a dying star, and a lot of
00:23:40 --> 00:23:43 catching up. Get WOL soon, Huw.
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 And as ever, the credit for this show belongs
00:23:46 --> 00:23:48 to the whole team behind it. If you've got a
00:23:48 --> 00:23:50 question you'd like us to chase the way you
00:23:50 --> 00:23:52 did with Link and Swift, use the contact
00:23:52 --> 00:23:55 form@astronomydaily.IO you'll
00:23:55 --> 00:23:58 find us on socials. Astrodaily pod and
00:23:58 --> 00:24:00 the show notes have every source.
00:24:00 --> 00:24:01 Anna: I'm Anna.
00:24:01 --> 00:24:03 Avery: And I'm Avery. Clear Skies.